CHICAGO – Marilu Arce loves her job, but for a time she considered leaving.
The traffic-plagued commute from her distant suburban home to her downtown Chicago office, nearly two hours each way, meant her daughters couldn't enroll in after-school activities because she couldn't get home in time to take them.
Then her employer adopted a policy permitting her to work from home two days a week. Her stress level has dropped. Her daughters are thrilled that they can play travel softball. She tackles household chores with more energy. She likes her job more.
"It's the best of both worlds," said Arce, an assistant controller in the corporate accounting department at National Equity Fund, a Chicago-based nonprofit. "If I ever thought about leaving this place, I would think twice."
That's the type of reaction Arce's boss, CEO Joe Hagan, likes to hear as the company measures the success of the work-from-home policy it instituted three years ago in hopes of improving employee retention. So far, it seems to be working: turnover was less than 5 percent last year, its lowest ever.
But Hagan is cautious. Though a growing number of U.S. employees are working remotely, thanks in large part to technology that enables flexibility and young workers who expect it, the perk has been getting mixed reviews of late as some high-profile companies call employees back to the office for more face time.
Those stories "make me vigilant," Hagan said. "I want to see what went wrong there."
The most scrutiny recently has been on IBM, which in May announced it would require some of its remote staff in the U.S. and Canada to work out of regional offices. The change was particularly jarring because the technology giant was a pioneer in letting employees work remotely and in the software to facilitate that trend. Honeywell, Bank of America, Best Buy and Yahoo have made similar shifts away from remote work in recent years.